In early December I traveled to Barcelona along with most of the Vivit Board to attend the HP Discover conference. From a business perspective, this is always one of the highlights of my year. It’s a great opportunity to meet the best and brightest people in the HP Software community. In addition to meeting HP product managers and R&D teams, I enjoy the chance to discuss the challenges that I face each day with like-minded users of HP software and share best-practice techniques.

For two days before the conference, the Vivit board meets to discuss the best way to shape Vivit to meet the needs of the members. We were pleased to review the reports showing that our membership has reached an all-time high of around 28,000 members and that our member engagement in webinars has grown year-on-year.

Despite the positive member growth and engagement, we’re keen to do more. Please get in touch if you have any ideas for topics that we could discuss in our face-to-face events or if you’d like to get involved and help run your local user group.

Keynote round-up

During her first keynote speech, Meg Whitman reminded delegates that HP was founded in 1939 in Dave Packard’s one-car garage in Palo Alto, California. She likened the separation of the two companies to an "upgrade” to a two-car garage where each garage develops its own products, whilst collaborating and sharing tools behind the scenes.

When HP divides into two separate businesses, both HP-Enterprise and HP Inc. will be Fortune 50 organisations, each targeted at different market sectors. HP Enterprise will focus on servers, storage, networking, converged systems, services and software as well as the Helion cloud platform. HP Inc. will specialize in personal systems and printing.

Many of the co-presenters in the keynote sessions focused on the exciting projects that HP has worked on in the last 12 months.

Including:

The Cape-to-Cape challenge, a great case study showing how HP’s product teams worked well together working in application development and hardware provision using the Haven big-data platform.

The explosion of data and ever more complex IT platforms was a key topic in all of the keynotes. Against a backdrop of recent high-profile data breaches at Sony Pictures and other large organizations, security seemed even more relevant than in previous years and was mentioned by several keynote speakers.

Mike Nefkis expanded on the New style of IT. Mike described, amongst other things, HP’s dominance in IT security and automation. He went on to discuss how HP’s solutions can automate mundane tasks, freeing up IT teams to work on longer-term, high-value projects.

Robert Youngjohns discussed Big Data and how this is changing the way that businesses manage and consume data, regardless of whether the original source of data is machine, human or business-related. He described how Haven on demand allows multiple data sources to be combined into a single large dataset and how Idol on demand can be used to query that unstructured data. He invited attendees to visit www.idolondemand.com to explore the capabilities of IDOL through their public APIs.

Not forgetting the hardware teams, Meg Whitman described how HP collaborated with Intel to develop Apollo servers to improve server workloads by 50% per server. Martin Fink expanded upon the hardware theme, introducing "The Machine” which uses custom processors and large memory pools communicating using photonics to reduce compute costs and improve performance.

HP’s Helion cloud-platform, built on the OpenStack platform, was introduced as a platform ideally suited to hybrid-cloud solutions. Marten Mickos described this in more detail in his session, where he described the dramatic increases in efficiency required to reduce application/development lifecycles. He reminded us that multiple releases per year were no longer enough and many businesses now demand multiple software releases per week. Not all of us are there yet, but this is a definite trend that I’ve noticed.

For additional Discover events:

For me the key themes this year were Cloud computing, Big Data and IT Automation. I’m primarily interested in application performance testing, and I’m looking forward to seeing these game-changing trends filtering through to the applications that I use on a day-to-day basis.

Vivit Special Interest Groups

As well as Vivit’s local user groups and chapters, Vivit members can opt to join worldwide special interest groups who communicate and share experiences through webinars and other online events. If you’ve been inspired by the Discover key themes, visit our SIG pages to connect with like-minded Vivit members and share your experiences of using HP software.

Become a Vivit Leader

Vivit’s vast network of local user groups and special interest groups is made possible by over 100 volunteer leaders. Vivit leaders are at the forefront of the organisation, working with key members and HP to create valuable local and global activities to share best practices, learn from peers about real-world experiences, and hear about new HP Software developments in an unbiased and uncensored community.

We’re always on the lookout for people who are prepared to help out in our local events or webinars. For more information on how you can become more actively involved in Vivit, visit our Chapter Leader page or get in touch.